Dilli Dehat Project
Urban Villages, Sacred Geographies, and the Politics of Recognition in Delhi
In collaboration with independent researcher Puneet Singh Singhal
The Problem
Delhi's urban villages — the lal dora settlements and revenue villages absorbed by the expanding city — occupy a paradoxical position in planning law. They are historically documented, legally recognised in revenue records, and inhabited by communities with generational ties to the land. Yet in practice, they are systematically excluded from the green city vision: their commons are encroached upon, their water bodies blocked, their forests enclosed, and their spatial claims erased from official planning maps.
This is not administrative oversight. It is recognition injustice — the refusal of planning systems to acknowledge certain communities as legitimate claimants to the urban environment.
The Case: Deoli Village
The primary case study is Deoli village in the Sangam Vihar–Sainik Farm cluster in South Delhi. The site documents three overlapping processes of dispossession:
Forest Department Enclosure. Land historically used as commons by the village community has been enclosed by the Forest Department under conservation narratives, effectively converting community-managed green space into bureaucratically controlled territory inaccessible to residents.
Johad Blockade. The village johad — a traditional rainwater harvesting pond central to both ecological function and community identity — has been blocked and degraded through surrounding development, severing a centuries-old relationship between the community and its water commons.
Planning Erasure. Despite being documented in revenue records, Deoli and settlements like it are absent or misrepresented in Delhi's Master Plans, rendering them invisible to the planning gaze and ineligible for green infrastructure investment.
Theoretical Contribution
The Deoli case is used to develop the recognition justice argument at the heart of the doctoral thesis: that misrecognition is not a residual effect of distributive deprivation but its structural precondition. A community that does not exist in the planning imagination cannot receive procedural representation or distributive redress. The sequence runs from recognition to procedure to distribution — not the reverse.
The Dilli Dehat Project
This case study is part of a broader collaborative initiative with independent researcher Puneet Singh Singhal documenting Delhi's urban village commons and sacred geographies — the johads, groves, shrines, and commons that persist in the interstices of the planned city and that official Delhi systematically fails to see.
Status
Fieldwork ongoing. Case study under development as part of the doctoral dissertation.